Op-Ed: How Australia’s Floating Hotel Fell Into the Hands of a Dictatorship
The route began at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, made its way to Saigon, Vietnam, and finally ended up at the Korean Peninsula.
This might sound like a pleasant travel itinerary for a long vacation, but it is, in fact, the unlikely journey of a floating hotel. While modern cruise ships are often referred to in this way, I’m not talking about any ocean vessels, but a literal floating hotel-the first in the world.
The John Brewer Floating Hotel was constructed in 1988 in Singapore. It was floated thousands of miles to Australia and placed atop its namesake, the John Brewer Reef in Queensland, in order to attract more tourists to the area.
Comprised of seven floors and almost 200 rooms, the five-star hotel was the crown jewel of its Australian developers, and teeming with luxury features. It was reported that amenities included “a glowing neon nightclub, bars and restaurants, a helipad and a tennis court.”
Over three decades later, the hotel is still around. However, the polished lacquer and luxury champagne rooms have long since deteriorated. What was once the John Brewer Floating Hotel is now known as the Hotel Haegumgang, and it is currently situated off of the Korean coast. Its current owner: The totalitarian government of North Korea. Under the dictatorial reign of Kim Jong-un, the once gleaming structure has fallen into complete disrepair, and is currently abandoned.
How did this once proud and popular Australian tourist attraction and opulent hotel fall into the hands of the most oppressive regime in the world?
The journey begins amidst a literal storm of troubles. The hotel was battered by a cyclone before it even opened, and that was just the beginning of the problems. Soon, the hotel began to hemorrhage money.
A variety of reasons were reported for the failure.
“Some journalists at the time suggested poor marketing, poor management, and a fire aboard one of the financial taxis,” said the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC).
No matter the cause, the developers of the hotel soon realized that their floating megastructure was never going to be profitable. They soon decided to move on from the project and dump it on the highest bidder.
“Just to cover the losses, the company sold the hotel to another company based in Ho Chi Minh City [previously known as Saigon], in Vietnam,” Robert De Jong, the curator of the Townsville Maritime Museum, told ABC.
Thus, the palatial lodge was sent on another trip across the ocean and floated thousands of miles northwest to the Vietnamese coastline. It was soon rebranded as the Saigon Floating Hotel and moored along the city’s riverbank. The aquatic construction enjoyed relative prosperity during its tenure in Saigon.
“For most of those traveling to Vietnam around 1990, this was the place to stay,” said travel blogger Mark Bowyer, describing the hotel as he found it during a 1993 visit to Saigon. “Known then as ‘the floater’, it was dragged up from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in a hurry to service the incoming business and government delegations that were swept up in the hype of Vietnam’s ‘doi moi’ market opening.”
Beyond being a major destination for those visiting the country, the Saigon Floating Hotel also became a popular spot for nightlife in the city due to its multiple nightclubs. The business was booming, just as it had been in the very early days of its life along the Australian coastline. However, history would soon repeat itself, as the hotel soon ran into more financial and logistical problems, and as the end of the decade approached, the owners were once again looking to make a profitable exit.
That’s when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea came knocking at the developer’s door.
The details of the transaction with North Korea are mostly unclear. All that is known for sure is that the country purchased the floating building in 1998, renamed it the Hotel Haegumgang, and brought it to an area known as the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region.
This special administrative zone opened to tourists in the late 1990s, and was one of the only locations where South Koreans could legally enter and exit North Korea along the border. The hotel was supposed to be part of a large resort in which people visiting the administrative zone could stay.
The remaining history of the Hotel Haegumgang is foggy, similar to everything else in North Korea. The building has seemingly been abandoned and dilapidated for many years, and it’s hard to say for sure if the hotel ever hosted guests or was ever used for its intended purpose.
In late 2019, ABC reported that Kim Jong-un had become disillusioned with the entire resort’s look and state, and ordered major renovations to begin on the hotel.
“The buildings are just a hotchpotch with no national character at all,” Jong-un reportedly said. “[The buildings must be rebuilt] to meet North Korea’s own sentiment and aesthetic taste.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the world, though, it is unclear whether plans for the hotel’s redevelopment ever got underway. Despite the disease reaching most major countries, North Korea has been characteristically quiet about its COVID-19 statistics. Government officials continue to state that the country has not had any confirmed cases of the virus, although this is almost certainly not true.
“From the outside, it is impossible to prove the scale of the COVID-19 crisis in North Korea,” Wired said in a recent article. “All official messaging is controlled by Kim Jong-un’s regime and international diplomats and humanitarian groups have largely left the country.”
Given that the true nature of the nation’s battle with the pandemic is unknown, it is entirely plausible that renovations were either halted, never began, or are ongoing. The country will likely never say.
Today, the only thing that is known for sure is that the Hotel Haegumgang still exists. Google Earth satellite photographs taken this year show the structure sitting in the harbor, in the same spot it has occupied since it arrived in North Korea:
So for now, the place once called the John Brewer Floating Hotel, the crowning achievement of a number of Australian developers, continues to rust in the world’s most isolated country. Perhaps one day it can recapture some of its former glory, and once again have people meandering down the halls.
It is more likely, though, that this long and strange saga has come to an end, and the world’s first floating hotel has reached its final destination.
